by Ginger Voight

Created on: May 29, 2010   Last Updated: March 26, 2011

By the time I was eleven I had decided on and similarly discarded several career aspirations. Santa never did bring me that plastic medical bag I always wanted, and being a princess pretty much flew out the window when Prince Charles wed in July of that year.

Since I loved to argue my family figured I'd end up being a lawyer, which sounded just as good as anything else at the time. I didn't know where I would live or who I would marry, but I knew I could get good grades and go to college. It was one big life decision wrapped up in a very safe, unpredictable package.

That idea pretty much came to a screeching halt in October of 1981.

I was a typical sixth grade student at Alice Landergin Elementary in Amarillo, Texas. I was a good girl who did what I was told and colored inside the lines. That made what happened when Mrs. Adams handed out our Halloween writing assignment all the more strange.

The assignment itself was pretty straight forward. It was a Halloween story we had to create based on a plain black and white illustration of a house. It was the first time I had ever been asked to write a story that I can remember, but since I was such a good student I didn't anticipate any real problem fulfilling Mrs. Adams' expectations.

How hard could it be to write a story?

My mind churned as I stared at the picture. I knew I was expected to write something scary, but there was nothing inherently spooky about the house the way it was drawn.

My pencil took on a life of its own as it scrawled across the wide-ruled notebook paper. The story unfolded about a man who loved his bride so much he wanted to build her a classic two-story home big enough for loads of children. As the many years passed the loving couple found that they were unable to have the family they had so wanted, and their house became a ghost of their unfulfilled dreams. When they died the house was turned into an orphanage, to fill that once empty home with a love so strong it could be shared from beyond the grave.

I colored the picture with bright, cheerful colors, attached it to the story and turned it in without a second thought. In fact I was rather excited to see how well I did on this new challenge. It never occurred to me that I would fail... until the day the graded assignments were handed back to us.

My excitement soon gave way to anxiety when I realized my teacher had given the assignments back to everyone else but me. The more I thought about it the more I just knew that I had screwed up. I

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